Continental Layout And Ice Ages.

(This was my most popular thread when it was first written. I’m afraid that my new understanding of the fact that earth is growing, supersedes and falsifies this matter. However the application of the Stefan-Boltzmann law in this way, appears to be original to me. And this sort of thinking likely would give us the answer as to how to get out and stay out of a really hard-wired full-blown glacial period. This understanding can do nothing to help us avoid the oncoming “little ice age” barreling down on us.)

I’m actually a bit of a technophobe and do not know how to do proper links and post pictures and stuff.

So I’ll put the link up straight and maybe you copy it to a browser page lined up next to this screed.

You need to put two browser pages up side by side and cut and paste the links to the pictures of the historical continental layouts of the planet.

Make the left-hand browser as skinny as you can and use that to read my commentary. Then make the right-hand browser medium-skinny because the maps are pretty wide.

Here is map of how the continents were layed out 195 million years ago. Would we expect ice?

Well see how the South Pole is totally free of land. Here is the potential for the uninhibited movement of warm water from the equater to the South Pole.

But it appears that the North Pole is covered. Whereas the whole globe would be unlikely to ever get as cold as it is now still it would be surprising if there weren’t ice breakouts near the North Pole some winters and sometimes a bit of climatic instability.

Still one does not expect a full-blown ice age to get started like we have today.

Although the North-South aspect of Pangea cuts off the left-side-ocean from the right-side-ocean…. and that will make for the planet not being as warm as it would be if there were a large deep seperation in the middle….

…..Nonetheless the cirulation around the bottom of the land mass is so unihibited that we would expect the planet to be warmer then it is today.

The planet will have warmed up in the interim 40 million years. Since we have a seperation in the middle allowing cirulation between the oceans. See how the main body of land (now Gondwana) has moved further towards the South Pole.

But it has not gotten all that close to the South Pole still. Not close enough to expect oscillating ice formation because the circulation to the South Pole will be so damned good there would be no chance for Gondwanaland to ever get cold.

This is the late cretaceous of 94 million years ago. Here we expect great lushness and warmth. The North Pole looks to be no longer covered. If the land has now reached the South Pole still it has not surrounded it. The currents are less inhibited then we’ve seen so far. But a hint of doom pervades the situation. Although there has been no chance for ice to have ever formed on the Southern lands yet there they are already looking like they will one day cover, surround and cut off the South Pole.

But lo…. the North Pole she remains free and the continents everywhere are spread out. So the grave proximity or even the reaching of the Pole by the Southern land is not yet the big problem it will one day become.

Here’s 66 million years ago when the dinosaurs were wiped out. I think the place went from a lush, tropical pardise…. even near the poles… into some sort of “atomic winter” almost overnight. Surely a great shock to the system.

Still it ought to be pretty clear that the open nature of the continents… The fact that while the South Pole is covered by the land its not likely to be totally surrounded by it…. Well it should be clear that the ocean currents are about as uninhibited as can be imagined.

Ten million years after that time there was some sort of massive release of methane that converts to CO2. This was the global heat maximum of 55 million years ago.

If you look at how things are we would expect a world nearly totally covered with water vapour and warm virtually all the year round at each and every part of the planet.

Under those circumstances it is more then plausible that a massive release of methane could heat the air up by ten degrees.

The reason being that the starting point is one where both the oceans AND THE DEEP OCEANS are already warm.

There is just nowhere for this extra energy to go.

And the total water vapour coverage combined with the methane combined with the great ocean circulation combined with the fact that the deep oceans were already warm is something that quite easily could lead to the heating that it did lead to.

Fourteen Million years ago. And our doom is foretold. Or more correctly our evolution via pumping holocaust.

See how Europe has fused with Asia. And Africa is squeezing off the ability for really good circulation between her and Eurasia. The North Pole is getting crowded out and already during the bad times in winter we are getting ice… not actually at the North Pole yet but on the Northern tips of the land masses. And of course Antarctica is covered with ice. And therefore arid and therefore a great sinkhole for any excessive heating.

The surface currents now go round and round Antarctica instead of out and back from the equator. So at ground level Antarctica is cut off and grows colder. Still when there is warming excess heat will tend to pour in higher up. Perhaps at mid-Troposhere. So there is no chance of Antarctica ever being free of ice yet she will funnel heat out into space (THE SLLLLLUTTT).

The entire planet has been steadily cooling for 30 million years at this point. Sure oscillating in its temperature but ultimately the trend is down and down and down.

Now look how North and South America are almost fused together. This is immensely serious because of the North/South aspect of these continents almost going from pole to pole.

Immensely serious and a grave threat that should leave you in high suspense as to what happens in the next picture.

See what else I’ve said about taking a marginalist approach. And look up the Stefan-Boltzmanns law. Serious overheating looking to be impossible anytime soon.

Its not that water is forced away from the Poles. Its that there is RESISTANCE TO CIRCULATION.

The greater the RESISTANCE TO CIRCULATION the more scope there is for there to be heat differenctials between semi-independent bodies of water.

The circulation will still happen of course. But since there is more resistance to it it takes greater heat and salt differentials to DRIVE IT.

If you go to the same pictorial site I linked then it looks like this planet cannot overheat until well over 150 million years from now.

But the suns output is very slowly creeping up.

So if ours species is around in 200 million years we would probably have to act to take the edge off.

Thats only going on what this fellow is saying about Continental drift.

The law of averages would apply such that there will be more differentials, more often, between the heat of various bodies of water then there would be if the Continents were so arranged as to apply less resistance to circulation.

And therefore the Stefan-Boltzmanns law will see to it that there is a permanent bias towards catastrophic cooling which extra CO2 may hopefully mitigate but surely cannot overide.

Graeme, I read about this some time ago as well – I think probably from something by William H. Calvin at the U of Washington: http://www.williamcalvin.com/index.html. He is an omnivore; I suspect you would enjoy him. He credits the ice age bottlenecks with the evolution of modern humans.

So why don’t we just remove the ismuth of Panama? Why do you seem to prefer our willynilly cooking of our global ecosystems?

Well to warm things us you’d really want to remove Central America and have a very deep channel.

And it was an hard enough ‘ask’ to dig the Panama Canal.

“So why don’t we just remove the ismuth of Panama? Why do you seem to prefer our willynilly cooking of our global ecosystems?”

It aint happening Tom. You’re making it up.

We’ll go into pretty severe cooling by the time the 30’s rock around. And it will take a long time to recover from that.

There is one place where a channel could be made. And thats at the North Pole. Because it would be a matter of popping a nuke under the ice such that all the ice cracks and we can get shipping going through that shortcut.

But this is a troubling idea.

Because one wants to know that one isn’t screwing up the plankton. And because ice is a great insulator. And you’d want to know that the improvement in circulation wasn’t coming at the expense of losing all that heat.

And the thing is the ocean circulation would probably eventually be enhanced by opening up that sea. But I’d want to know just how long that was going to take.

Enhanced shipping would be an economic boon to such a scheme but there is some timing issues with the warming/cooling implied.

“So, leaving modeling questions aside, what is the set of physical data that is the basis of the arguments for global warming?”

There is none. Its a hoax. If there is any data whatsoever that for a short time looked like some strange and excessive warming might be going on its a slight overshoot in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Where the air temperature overshot a little the solar activity.

But CO2 is a weak explanation of this since we cannot find any prior situation where we can make it that CO2 is the causal factor behind warming. And there are very plausible explanations which need to be explored if they haven’t already been explored.

Its just a hoax Zach.

Its just testimony to decades of socialist financing in science and where that has finally led us.

Its a testimony of how the world, through big government, has broken off into taxeater and taxpayer tribes. And the taxeater tribe has its own tribal positions on matters not relating to the reality of the situation except by sheer coincidence.